Posted by Unknown
Posted on 6:50:00 PM
“Your parents have not been careful enough to see that you were educated. They preferred to send you to work in the fields or in the factories, in order to have a few more sous. And have I nothing to reproach myself for? Have I not often made you water my garden instead of studying? And when I wanted to go fishing for trout, have I ever hesitated to dismiss you?”
Then, passing from one thing t
Posted by Unknown
Posted on 6:44:00 PM
While I was wondering at all this, Monsieur Hamel had mounted his platform, and in the same gentle
and serious voice with which he had welcomed me, he said to us:
“My children, this is the last time that I shall teach you. Orders have come from Berlin to teach nothing but German in the schools of Alsace and Lorraine. The new teacher arrives to-morrow. This is the last class in French, so I be
Posted by Unknown
Posted on 6:35:00 PM
I WAS very late for school that morning, and I was terribly afraid of being scolded, especially as
Monsieur Hamel had told us that he should examine us on participles, and I did not know the first thing about them. For a moment I thought of staying away from school and wandering about the fields. It was such a warm, lovely day. I could hear the blackbirds whistling on the edge of the wood
Posted by Unknown
Posted on 5:21:00 PM
“Meanwhile the siege went on—not the siege of Berlin, alas! It was the time of intense cold, of the
bombardment, of epidemics and of famine. But, thanks to our care, to our efforts, to the unwearying
affection which multiplied itself about him, the old man’s serenity was not disturbed for an instant. To
the very end I was able to obtain white bread and fresh meat for him. There was none for
Posted by Unknown
Posted on 5:12:00 PM
He could not see our unfortunate Paris, all in confusion and dreadful to behold. What he saw from his bed was a section of the Arc de Triomphe, and in his room, about him, a collection of bric-a-brac of the First Empire, well adapted to maintain his illusion. Portraits of marshals, engravings of battles, the King of Rome in a baby’s dress, tall consoles adorned with copper
trophies, lade
Posted by Unknown
Posted on 5:07:00 PM
“When I left the room, the girl was waiting for me at the door, pale as death. She was sobbing.
“‘But he is saved!’ I said, taking her hands.
“The unhappy child hardly had the courage to reply. The true report of Reichshofen had been placarded; MacMahon in retreat, the whole army crushed. We gazed at each other in consternation. She was in despair, thinking of her father. I trembled, thinking
Posted by Unknown
Posted on 5:00:00 PM
WE were going up Avenue des Champs-Elysées with Dr. V——, asking the shell-riddled walls, and the sidewalks torn up by grape-shot, for the story of the siege of Paris, when, just before we reached the Rond-point de l’Etoile, the doctor stopped and, pointing to one of the great corner houses so proudly grouped about the Arc de Triomphe, said to me:
“Do you see those four closed windows up there
Posted by Unknown
Posted on 10:21:00 AM
SEQUENCE
To sleep, with the moon in one eye
and the sun in the other,
Love in your mouth,
a lovely bird in your hair,
Adorned like the fields,
the woods, the routes, the sea,
around the whole world so lovely and adorned.
Flee across the landscape
Through branches of smoke and all the fruits of the wind,
Stone legs with sand stockings,
Held by the waist, all the river's muscles,
An
Posted by Unknown
Posted on 8:58:00 PM
The right hand lets sand slip through.
All transformations are possible.
Far off, the sun sharpens on the stones its haste to finish.
Describing the landscape matters little,
Just the pleasing length of a harvest.
For my two eyes a brightness
Like water and fire.
What is the role of the root?
Despair has severed all its links
Raising his hands to its head.
Seven, four, two, one,
In
Posted by Unknown
Posted on 7:12:00 PM
In the mist where glasses of water clatter against each other,
where snakes come looking for milk,
a monument of wool and silk disappears.
It is there that,
on the last night,
bringing their weakness,
all the women came in.
The world wasn't made for their ceaseless walking around,
their langorous gait,
their search for love.
Great country of bronze of the Belle Epoque,
along
Posted by Unknown
Posted on 7:07:00 PM
Under the red threat of a sword,
undoing her hair,
which guides kisses and shows the spot where kisses rest,
she is laughing.
On her shoulder,
ennui has dozed off.
Ennui can only be itself with her,
the rash one,
who laughs madly as day's end
dispersing red suns beneath bridges, blue moons,
faded flowers of a blasé bouquet.
She is like a great wagon of wheat
and her hands
Posted by Unknown
Posted on 7:03:00 PM
We are sleeping with red angels
who show us the desert without small letters
and those sweet desolate awakenings.
We are sleeping.
A single wing destroys us, evasion,
we have wheels older than the feathers flown away and lost,
with which to explore the graveyards of slowness,
the only lust.
The bottle we surround with the bandages of our wounds
resists no longing.
Let's take the h
Posted by Unknown
Posted on 6:58:00 PM
Sweep me away, world, and I'll have memories.
Thirty girls with opaque bodies,
thirty girls who in the imagination are goddesses,
draw near the man at rest in the little valley of lunacy.
The man in question is gambling fervently.
He plays against himself and wins.
The thirty girls quickly tire of this.
Gambling's caresses are not those of love,
and the sight isn't nearly as charming, seducti
Posted by Unknown
Posted on 6:52:00 PM
She is standing on my eyelids
And her hair mingles with mine,
She has the shape of my hands,
She has the color of my eyes,
She dissolves into my shadow
Like a stone against the sky.
Her eyes are always open
And she doesn't let me sleep.
Her dreams in daylight
Cause the suns to drift away,
Make me laugh, weep and laugh,
Speak when I have nothing to say.
Posted by Unknown
Posted on 6:46:00 PM
It's a restaurant like any other.
Does that mean that I don't look like anyone else?
A tall woman beside me is beating eggs with her fingers.
A traveler places his clothes on a table and accosts me.
He's wrong.
I don't know any mystery. I don't even know the meaning of the word: mystery.
I have never looked for anything, never found anything, he's wrong to insist.
The storm which now a
